Sharad Raj reflects on everyday encounters in India that reveal deep economic inequality, questioning middle-class complacency and the illusions of liberalization through simple yet powerful moments involving a biscuit packet, a piece of cake, and half a cauliflower.

I have a fear of flying. This basically means I travel by train within the country as much as possible. Born to a railway lady doctor, I was brought up on train travel. Back in the 70s and 80s flying was not common. Only the ultra-rich would fly or when a client was paying for the ticket. We travelled the length and breadth of the country by train, including a train journey from Lucknow to Trivandrum that meant three nights on board a long-distance train in a non-AC, albeit first-class compartment.

All of this transformed once India opened its economy. Private airlines came, earnings of the middle class took a substantial leap, and prices of air tickets dropped, in fact becoming at par with train tickets at times. The country suddenly started to fly.

Liberalization and the New Bubble

Our children, children born to our generation, to our peers, in our families, grew up never even visiting a railway station, leave alone travelling in a train. They are encouraged by their parents to travel by air, the rationale being the pricing is almost the same and it takes less time. Surely. But in the process people started to lose touch with reality, and an entire generation entered adulthood, then middle age, oblivious of the larger and finer ground realities. Aspirations took precedence over substantial understanding of the world we live in. The result was that almost two generations grew up seduced by the promises of liberalization. Such was the seduction of 21st century life that when farmers were agitating and youngsters were asked who feeds us, they replied, “Zomato and Swiggy”. New India had well and truly arrived.

A substantial mass of our population, I am sure, has no idea about shopkeepers, that there are provision stores, petty traders, daily wage workers etc. They are happily immersed in Blinkit and Zepto; I can lay a bet if a survey is done on means of transport the respondents will answer, “Uber and Ola,” with no idea as to how these corporations came and wiped out an entire industry of local taxis, auto and cycle rickshaws etc. It doesn’t matter to them, for they live in their own bubble, insulated from the rest of the world. Social media, a double-edged sword, is both a window to the world and a poor conductor of realities of life.

The upwardly mobile middle class cannot think beyond bullet trains, expressways and AI maybe. This ignorance then becomes a perfect breeding ground for fascism. The fascist keeps selling us dreams and we keep believing in them with no enquiry about the consequences. Who wants to know what happened to the kali-peeli taxi drivers, how are our local kirana stores surviving, where have the children of the mill workers disappeared, how are hookers, beggars and black marketeers surviving? After all they are all “parasites” living off the taxes we pay! Ya, sure. Are they living? Really? Price rise and absurdly priced stuff at food malls don’t matter to us for it doesn’t affect us, after all we pay our taxes not for health, education, housing or jobs, but for our dispensable aspirations that are essentially consumerist.

A Platform at Borivali

These thoughts came to me while waiting for my train to Delhi at Borivali station, when I saw shoeshine people lined up in a row with no business at all. Remember Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine or Raj Kapoor’s Boot Polish or the young Vijay from Deewar?

Most people no longer wear leather shoes, so this community of shoe shiners in Mumbai is getting extinct without work. Can they learn any other trade? No, for most of them have no capacity. Just then a family of five arrived on the platform for some other train and parked itself near me. I was close to a platform shack selling biscuits, cakes and soft drinks. The eldest child of the couple in the family was a girl who wanted a piece of cake. The mother refused. She wanted to buy a packet of biscuits instead, for that would feed the whole family as opposed to a piece of cake. The tension continued for a while between the mother and daughter, with the girl getting no support from the silent father. Maybe he was feeling small about his own failure to be able to afford something that not the whole family but only one could eat.

After a while the father went and bought the biscuit packet. The girl refused to eat the biscuits. It was now that I intervened and very apologetically asked the father if it did not offend them, I could buy the child a piece of cake. I had no courage to look into his eyes. The father nodded in a yes, looking away from me. The cake was of just Rs 20. So was the biscuit packet. We still live in a country where families need to weigh their priorities at the level of a biscuit packet and a piece of cake.

Half a Cauliflower

It was only last week that I went out to buy some fresh river fish with my house help in a slum-dominated area. The help had to buy some vegetables also. A lady with her two small kids arrived at the vegetable stall and started to ask the prices of every vegetable there. Not to forget that by then I had asked my help to buy as much quantity for the prices were abysmally low. And this lady with her two boys tugging along was figuring out what vegetable to buy.

She finally bought just half a cauliflower!!! At a conservative estimate there could be five or six family members in her house, but the cauliflower was just half. That is all she could afford that evening. I am sure she would mix it with potatoes and top it with red chilli powder and heaps of salt, but that is not the point. The point is it was just half a cauliflower for the whole family.

The Quiet Arithmetic of Survival

This is how a vast majority lives in our country. We may be oblivious of their existence, but they hang in there and do whatever it takes to survive.

After all it is just half a cauliflower and a piece of cake.

Thought Factory, Ideas That Question Power, Perspective Shift, Deep Thinking, Critical Conversations, Opinion With Integrity, Thinking Aloud, Intellectual Space, Reflective Journalism, Questions That Matter,